


Things Without All Remedy

by unbelieve



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, it's a groundhog day au, lowkey suicidal actions but not intent?, so like go off of that canon as an idea, the major character death is temporary, uhhhh what else, what's done can be undone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21816550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unbelieve/pseuds/unbelieve
Summary: Sonya falls asleep on the ship headed for the Safe Haven. She wakes up before the ship sets sail. It happens again. Again. Again.TMR Groundhog Day AU for faiasakura.
Relationships: Harriet/Sonya | Elizabeth "Lizzy" (Maze Runner), Newt & Sonya | Elizabeth "Lizzy" (Maze Runner)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: Maze Runner Secret Santa 2019





	Things Without All Remedy

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Macbeth_

The first time, Sonya doesn’t save anyone. 

Or, in fixing the ship she does, but the things to come will be different. Whereas the Right Arm has decided she will be put to work hoisting panels into place, or running parts because their best runners have finally gotten too tired to go up and down ladders, or directing people as they get close to launch, the universe has decided elsewise. 

The Group A boys return as they’re preparing to launch, and although she could swear they’re missing one in exchange for the one they’ve found, she can’t come up with a name. When they’ve met, they’ve usually had bigger problems, and perhaps she only missed him in the rush anyway. The girl is missing. Teresa, she thinks, the one who’d betrayed their camp but had seemed kind the time or two they’d talked. It’ll be a complicated legacy, even if right now she’s still alive somewhere. The boys don’t really talk when they come back. It’s hard to say what happened.

For a while, Sonya’s caught up in the surge of newcomers flooding off the Berg who have to be sorted out. Some need medical attention, some are simply shaken, almost all of them just need someone to tell them what to do. She remembers that feeling after escaping, breaking out of structure only to feel like you don’t know how to live without it. 

Finally, though, the rush ends. With the ship in motion, headed for long-promised safety, she falls asleep in a corner of the deck with Harriet’s head on her shoulder.  
____  
She wakes up back in the shipbuilding camp. 

She scrambles to her feet, ignoring the way people are beginning to look at her, blinking blearily against the morning sun. “What’s- no, this isn’t right, what’s happening?”

“Sonya?” Harriet’s fully alert almost immediately, a vestige of their time in the Maze. “What’s wrong?”

Sonya spins, looking around for anything that makes sense, any kind of explanation she can grasp onto, but when she looks at the ship there’s a part missing that she knows they put on yesterday. 

“Sonya?”

She points, not caring about the attention she’s attracting. “That panel. Didn’t we put that on? A bunch of us lifted it, and the welders put it on, and- and we left on the ship! That’s the more important part of this, we literally left!”

Harriet’s in front of her then, one hand pressed to her cheek. “Sonya, Sonya, hey, calm down. Breathe.”

“What’s going on? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Harriet looks around at the number of people staring at them, then takes her hand and pulls her off to the side. Sonya fights the urge to struggle against her. If she can’t trust Harriet, she can’t trust anyone, and the thought of that tears something to shreds in her chest. 

“What’s going on with you?” Harriet asks once they’re behind one of the tents.

“Nothing’s going on with me, something’s going on with- with everything! I don’t know what’s happening, we’re back where we were yesterday, and you don’t- do you not see any of it?”

“Did you hit your head? Or do you- I don’t know, do you feel sick or anything?”

“No! I feel fine, I just want to know what’s going on!”

Harriet takes her hand again, rubbing tiny circles with her thumb. “Sonya, I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. But putting that panel up was the first thing on the schedule for this morning, and the ship hasn’t left that spot.”

“So I’m losing it. Is that what this is?” Sonya pulls her hand out of Harriet’s, then immediately feels guilty. None of whatever’s happening is Harriet’s fault. 

“You’ve been under a lot of stress for- I mean, as long as we can remember, really.” 

So Harriet doubts her sanity, at least a little. Sonya’s not sure she blames her, but knowing that rationally and hearing that kind of doubt from the person she loves are two different things. “I don’t feel like I’m crazy. Or I guess I do now, since no one else is seeing this, but I feel normal.” She’s pacing now, knows she’s getting louder again but can’t bring herself to care. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

Harriet bites her lip, considering for a moment. “As much as I hate to say it, maybe it’s WCKD. God knows they’ve done enough to our brains.”

“But what would this get them? Unless this whole thing is fake, and everything since we’ve escaped has been a simulation or something, and then-”

“Okay, no. Let’s not spiral that far yet. I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

Sonya would love to put it aside so easily, she really would, except, “What if you’re right?”

“I’m probably not. And if I am, what does it matter? We can’t do anything differently. So let’s assume I’m wrong, and go from there.”

She wants to argue with that. Everything in her nature screams out against passive acceptance. It’s just that Harriet’s probably right, is almost always right. 

“So what do I do?” Sonya hates the pleading tone in her voice, but how is she supposed to deal with something like this? 

Harriet takes a breath, and Sonya watches the shift as she slips into her leader persona, calm and rational because she has to be. She hasn’t really seen it in full force since the Maze, and she’s not sure if that makes it more or less reassuring. “Get through today. We fix the ship, we launch. We work on getting everyone to safety. I think that’s what’s important.”

“What if it happens again?”

“Then we’ll figure it out.” Harriet takes her hand and squeezes it a little, and this time Sonya pulls her closer, instead of pulling away. 

“Thank you,” she says, and kisses Harriet softly. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

She goes through the day again. She does her best to keep it together, although she’s not sure how well she’s succeeding based on the looks people keep throwing her. Maybe they’re just remembering her earlier breakdown. It all plays out the same way, down to the last-second arrival of the Berg.

This time, she looks for the Group A boys as they return. There’s definitely one missing.  
——  
It happens again. 

This time, she knows better than to cause a scene. It won’t make a difference, other than making everyone look at her more. She just pulls Harriet aside, because she knows that keeping this to herself won’t work. She’d like to try, but she knows herself well enough to know it won’t work. 

She fights to remain a little steadier this time when she lays out the facts. Hysteria won’t help her case, tempting as it may be. The story itself is unbelievable enough. 

When she’s done, Harriet’s just looking at her, brow furrowed in concern. 

“Sonya, I don’t-”

“Tell me I’m not going insane, Harriet.” It comes out pleading again, the one thing she’d been trying to avoid.

“You’re not going insane.”

“Do you actually believe that?”

Harriet must hear the desperation she’s trying to fight down, because this time she considers her answer carefully. “I don’t think you are. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know why no one’s seeing whatever it is you’re seeing, but I don’t think you’ve suddenly gone crazy. You still seem like you.”

“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Like, does this mean something? Am I supposed to do something? Or- or am I dead or something, and now I’m stuck here?”

“Okay, Sonya, breathe for a second. I’m pretty sure you’re not dead. I don’t know what it means, but maybe there’s someone who does.”

So Sonya stops, and she breathes, and then she says, “I’m going to break into WCKD.”

And apparently, that wasn’t the answer Harriet had expected. “What?”

“If anyone’s gonna know what’s happening to me, it’s probably them. Maybe they did this to me.”

“You’re gonna potentially doom yourself by breaking into not only the city, which, may I remind you, is surrounded by massive walls, but the most protected building in the place?”

“I can do it. It’s not like I don’t have time on my side, here.”

“Whatever’s going on here doesn’t mean you won’t die if you get shot.”

“I’m not even sure about that. Maybe I’ll just wake up again.”

“Sonya.”

“I’ll be careful. But I’m going.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“They need you here. And besides, I’ll be harder to spot if I’m alone.”

Harriet looks like she’s on the verge of arguing, swaying back and forth on the precipice. “You’d better come back.”

Sonya leans in and kisses her. “I will. I promise.”

The first time breaking into the city is the hardest, as one might expect. It’s slower than one might expect, though, a lot of watching, a lot of waiting. Were it not for the parts with an immediate fear of getting shot, it would almost be boring. For better or for worse, there are a fair number of those parts. 

She does make it in, though. She steals a guard uniform, and it’s her introduction to the idea that confidence might get her farther than anything else. The right place, the right time, the right posture, the right attitude, a willingness to swallow your morals and don the colors of everything you hate. Act like you belong, and that’ll matter more than the fact that it feels like your insides are corroding.

It buys her time, more than anything. Time to map out the building and work her way to the center, time to wait and watch and finally tail the one person who has to know what’s being done to her, if it’s WCKD at all. 

Working her way into Ava Paige’s lab without getting caught, though, seems like an entirely separate problem. She pauses in the hallway, watching the doctor look at a microscope slide, scribble something down, look again. She makes a lap, doing her best to look like she’s simply on patrol. Sometime in the middle of her second lap, the realization hits her. 

Why shouldn’t she get caught?

When she makes it into Dr. Paige’s lab, she’s escorted in by two guards. It’s not the neatest entrance, but it’ll do. 

Paige studies her for a long moment, before dismissing the guards. 

“Subject B-4. Sonya.” Off Sonya’s look of surprise, she says, “They scanned you when they caught you. You were reported missing after the raid on the train. And yet you’re here now.”

“Yes?” She’s not really sure what Dr. Paige expects her to say.

“Why?”

Sonya thinks about lying, but it’s hard to see the point in that. The more time she wastes, she figures, the more of a chance she keeps waking up in the camp she’d thought she’d left behind. So she just says, “I have questions for you.”

“Why should I answer to you?” It’s not really mocking, to Sonya’s surprise. It’s more curious than anything.

“Because this? This whole conversation? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Yesterday, I saw this building collapse. Kids I talked to saw you die. And here we are, so I don’t think it particularly matters to your future one way or the other.”

Paige frowns, visibly struggling to piece together something coherent. “What does that mean?”

“It means that I’ve already lived today twice,” Sonya says, because she’s already committed.

“That’s not possible.”

“But it is. I’m living today for the third consecutive time. And if you know anything about it, I suggest you tell me.”

“You’re negotiating with no leverage. I respect it, but I don't know how far it’s going to get you.”

She’s right. Sonya had had her launcher and pistol taken from her, and she suspects that trying to get to the knife she keeps inside her boot will get her killed before she can reach it. 

She scrambles, scanning the room, looking for a weapon, but then she goes still. “I can tell you about the Cure.”

“The Cure doesn’t work.”

“What if there’s another version that does?” Sonya says, putting everything she has into the lie.

Paige watches her for another long moment, attempting to tease out the truth. “So if I help you determine what exactly it is you’re experiencing, you’ll share what you know about the Cure?”

And god, Sonya almost feels bad for lying, somehow. She never thought she’d feel bad about lying to one of WCKD’s central figures, but the hope in Dr. Paige’s eyes isn’t fake. It’s desperate, but it’s real. Still, she says, “Yes.”

Paige nods. “Then, first, you have to know how absurd the whole thing sounds.”

“I do, trust me. But I think it’d be a really pointless thing to make up. And there’s also the fact that I’ve basically handed myself over to you.”

“So what exactly is it you want?” 

“I want to know how to break this loop. If you’re causing it, I want out.”

“We’re not. If we wanted frustration from you, if we wanted a struggle against something you perceived as fruitless, we would’ve gotten that from the Maze Trials.”

“So what is it?”

“Well, the most likely explanation to me would be a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. It can make you feel like you’ve already seen something before, even when it’s actually entirely unfamiliar. I don’t remember your exact file, but I don’t remember anyone in your group showing symptoms, although something could’ve caused it to set in more recently.”

“It’s not just a moment, though, it’s the whole day.”

“Well, that doesn’t have quite as neat of an answer, but it’s still most likely something in your brain giving off false signals.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“Well, we could run some tests, we can see-”

“No,” Sonya says, heart suddenly pounding in her chest. “No, I don’t think I want to let you run any tests on me. I’m going now.”

Dr. Paige makes a move, and Sonya shoves a gurney at her. Medical implements shower to the floor, but Sonya doesn’t look back. She runs, cursing everything about her lungs and her legs that had kept her from being a Runner back in the Maze. 

It’s when she gets the first stitch in her side, far too early on, that she knows she won’t last like this, won’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell on speed alone. She digs frantically for a solution, comes up with Aris, comes up with vents. She takes a turn down a side hallway, hoping, hoping, hoping. 

It pays off, although he’s never made it clear just how uncomfortable traveling like that is. It gets her far enough outside the alert zone that she can blend again, slipping into anonymity with the rest of the guards. It’s an odd feeling. She’d spent years standing out, years as a dual figurehead with Harriet as they struggled to keep the peace, keep them fighting. If hiding saves her life, though, it’s a sacrifice she’ll make.

She makes it back before the city blows, just barely. She doesn’t so much fall asleep as pass out.  
_______  
On the fourth day, she breaks into WCKD again. This time, she doesn’t wait to follow the others. She knows the way, so waiting for people who are seeing it for the first time will only slow her down. 

The problem is, this time she’s not quite sure where to go once she gets there. Her plan hadn’t been much of a plan at all, instead being more of a vague concept of breaking back in and finding capital-S Someone. 

She’s almost resigned to just wandering through the building in her guard uniform, in and out of labs until something proves interesting. But then she sees Teresa coming down the hall, and pauses for a moment. She doesn’t trust Teresa; that’s a given, after the betrayal. But she needs someone who might be willing to even entertain something that sounds so absurd, and she’s not sure who else to go to. So, even though her better judgment is screaming out in opposition, she follows Teresa down the hallway and into one of the antechambers near the central laboratories.

Teresa catches Sonya’s reflection in one of the windows before she even hears her, whirling around and reaching for the intercom button. 

“Wait!”

Teresa pauses, although her hand still hovers inches away from the button. “Who are you?”

Sonya looks up, spotting cameras in every corner.

“They don’t check the ones in here,” Teresa says. “They really only care about the lab and the hallways. Only a couple of us are ever here.” 

Which feels like a trap, maybe, but the more times she lives this day, the duller the idea of consequences becomes. She takes off her helmet. 

Teresa’s hand falls to her side. “Sonya, right? What are you doing here?”

“Yeah. I need- I need help, I guess.”

“They broke you out of here, and you came back because you need help?”

“I know it sounds absurd, okay? I’m the one living it. But I’m also the one who’s lived this stupid day four times, and I don’t know who else to go to!” She’s spiraling again, the way she had the second day. She fights for control, struggling to catch her breath. 

Teresa pulls out a chair, guiding her into it. “Slow down. What?”

“Every day for the last four days, I wake up and it’s the same day. I don’t know why. At first I thought it was WCKD controlling me, but Dr. Paige didn’t seem to know-”

“When did you talk to Dr. Paige?”

“Yesterday. Or- I don’t know. My yesterday? The last version of today?”

Teresa takes a deep breath, and Sonya feels a little like she’s watching a computer reboot, searching for something that had already shut it down. “Okay. So... it’s a time loop, somehow.”

“I guess. What, do you know something about them?”

“All I know is that time isn’t really linear, that’s just the only way we can perceive it. So scientifically, I don’t know.”

“But?”

Teresa bites her lip, looking at the table. “But when I was very young, I was really into ghost stories. Guess growing up surrounded by death does weird things to a kid.” Teresa gives her a wry smile. “But people who remained on earth- they had a reason, something they needed to do. Unfinished business.” 

“You think I’m a ghost,” Sonya says flatly, and suddenly she’s acutely aware that she’s having this conversation with someone who she’s pretty sure is dead. At least, sort of. 

“No. You’d know if you were dead better than I would. I’m just saying, maybe it’s the same principle.”

“What would it be?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know you that well.”

Sonya’s about to ask for anything else, anything that might point her in the right direction, but as she’s opening her mouth, an alarm blares. 

Teresa looks to the flashing light, to Sonya, back, back again, and makes a decision. “Go.”

Sonya doesn’t wait to be told twice, doesn’t question Teresa’s choice to let her go. That’s a question to obsess over later. For now, she runs.  
_________  
She spends four back-to-back loops trying to save everyone. It never works.

She follows Thomas for the first few, just for the sake of convenience, splits off, works her way through WCKD. She helps release subjects. She helps the rebellion, guiding them toward the weak points she’s discovered. She tries every combination of the two, hoping to hit on the combination that’s good enough, that saves enough people, the one that matters. Every night, she goes to sleep hoping it’s enough. Every morning, she wakes up back where she started. 

She learns, though. She learns the easiest ways in, she learns the last minute she can get out without going down in flames with the city, she learns the patterns of the guards and the scientists and even the janitors. It’s a puzzle with one piece missing, everything complete except the one thing that ties the whole picture together.  
_________  
There’s a bad day, the ninth of the same. 

She works her way into the city once again, more out of habit than anything, but it feels pointless. She knows how this day will play out. Knows that she will run the same path over the next few hours, trying to fix everything, trying to save everyone, and it will never work. So what’s the point?

She changes course, heads for one of the residential buildings, follows someone into the elevator and up to the seventh floor. Smiles at the woman when she sends her a questioning look, says, “Visiting a friend.” 

She steps out and heads down the hallway in the opposite direction from the other passenger. There’s a wide window at the end of the hall, and a fire extinguisher on the wall next to it. That’s enough of a plan, really. She smashes the glass, stands on the window sill for a second until she hears doors opening, and she lets herself fall. It’s not really out of any particular desire to die. It’s just to see if it makes a difference. 

It doesn’t. It hurts in the flash before it stops and everything goes black, and then she wakes up in the next loop anyway.  
_____________  
Breaking into the city is easy by the tenth day. It’s more than knowing where all the tunnels are, it’s also knowing when certain sections will be patrolled, where she has to watch out for cameras, which situations she can fight her way out of and which need to be avoided altogether. It’s almost enough to make her want to take a different route, just to make things a little more interesting. Almost. She has places to be. 

She hasn’t been back to the room outside Teresa’s lab since the fourth loop, so it takes her a second to find it, but it’s empty except for one lone figure again. She’s not sure Teresa ever leaves the central core of the building, just those few rooms, and she’s also not entirely surprised that that might be the case. 

It’s the same pattern as before, then. She pleads with Teresa not to turn her in, saying she has secrets. When Teresa caves, she explains the time loops.  
Teresa studies her for a moment, clearly lost in thought, but she seems to take Sonya at her word. “So what have you already tried?”

“The first time, I kind of just did the same thing. Kinda just hoped it would go away. The day after, so I guess Day Three, the same thing happened, and I was afraid someone was messing with my brain or something. Broke in here, talked to Dr. Paige hoping that if it was you guys doing some weird shit to me, she’d tell me something. She didn’t know, and then she tried to put me through some testing, so that wasn’t a lot of help. Day Four, I came back and talked to you.”

Teresa’s expression shifts to something odd at that, something Sonya can’t quite decipher. “And what did I say?”

“You said I might have something I need to do.”

“Like a ghost story,” Teresa says quietly.

“Yeah. Exactly. The only problem is, I can’t figure out what it is. I spent four days doing everything I could think of to try to get out, saved some people, helped with-” She stops just short of talking about the rebellion, because somehow that doesn’t seem entirely smart. “I don’t know. I tried to fix things. It didn’t get me out.”

“So it’s something specific. What if we go through your file, just as a starting point, see if we can come up with any links?”

Sonya nods, just as the full impact of that hits her. Logically, she supposes she’d known they had a file on her. She’d been their test subject for years in the Maze, and maybe before that. It’s just that she’d never really thought she’d be able to see it, and that’s somehow a very different kind of feeling.

Teresa’s already behind a desk and tapping at the keyboard, navigating through a series of menus. Then she pauses, says, “Oh,” and clicks one more time. 

“What?”

“I might have found it. I don’t know, but maybe.”

“What?” Sonya repeats, a little more emphatically. She’s up like a shot, coming around the desk to lean over Teresa’s shoulder. “Who’s that?”

Even as she says it, she thinks she might know. She thinks this might be the one who doesn’t come home. For some reason, she’s never been able to track him down, never been able to pinpoint when it is he disappears.

“Newt. Group A, Subject 5,” Teresa says. And then: “He’s your brother.”

And how the fuck is Sonya supposed to react to that?

Sure, she knows what it’s supposed to mean. Deep in her brain, in the memories WCKD left about life in general but not in specific, there’s an idea of family. It’s not hers. It doesn’t tell her about the ways sharing DNA with this boy whose picture is on the screen is supposed to affect her life. 

The image is black and white, and clearly a couple years old, but it’s easy enough to match it to the real person. She only knows him vaguely, beyond his absence. They’d met at the Right Arm camp, and she was pretty sure he’d been part of the rescue operation that had freed their train car, but she didn’t know much more about him that that. The boys had tended to keep to themselves, which she supposes she can’t judge, given the way she and Harriet and Aris stick together. 

Her eyes are drawn to the bottom right of the screen, and her heart stutters a little in her chest. “He’s not immune?”

“No.”

“But I am, why isn’t he?” She knows that’s not how it works. It’s childish to think it’s that easy, but still. Maybe she doesn’t even know him, but she can’t wish that on anyone. 

“I wish it was that easy.”

Sonya sits back in the chair next to Teresa, and in the silence, the reality of the task before her catches up to her. “I don’t even know where he is! I don’t think I’ve seen him any of the other days, which means, assuming he’s dead, he died somewhere else entirely.”

“We might be able to find them. At least one of them, which should lead us to the rest. Unfortunately, I just pulled out their trackers, so that’ll make the whole thing a little harder, but-”

“But you can do it?”

“Yeah,” Teresa says, already typing. “I think so, at least. Just need to access enough cameras.”

“Wait.”

Teresa pauses, fingers hovering over the keys. “What?”

“While you’re in there, can you go back to my file?”

She clicks back a couple times. “Yeah. What do you want to know? Your name is here, where you’re from-“

“I just want to know- I want to know if my parents are alive.”

Teresa scrolls for a second, then hesitates before wordlessly turning the screen around.

“Oh,” Sonya says, softly. 

“I’m sorry.”

Sonya shakes her head, forcing herself to reset. “It’s not like I knew them.” She meets Teresa’s eyes, and for a moment it doesn’t matter what side of this they’ve found themselves on. Shattered families are something that every child of the end of the world knows.

Teresa turns away, and Sonya takes the moment to pull herself back. Teresa goes back to pulling up camera feeds, selecting and discarding the useless ones rapidly.

“What are you even looking for?”

Teresa pauses, hand falling away from the screen just a little bit. “I’m looking for Thomas. They’ll be together.”

“You’re gonna know it’s him?”

“I always know.” She goes back to searching, and Sonya watches, wishing she felt a little less useless. 

Finally, Teresa hits on something, a grainy image in the fading light outside. “There.”

Sonya sees Thomas. She sees a Crank. It’s a war with cognitive dissonance for a minute, before she forces herself to put it together. She sees Thomas. She sees Newt. 

She watches him die, scrambled pixels on a screen. None of it feels quite real.

“You’ll fix it,” Teresa says. “You don’t really have a choice.”

Sonya turns away from the screen and says, “You can see how that’s not a super comforting thing to say, right?”

“I’m just saying, he’s not dead in any timeline that matters. If he’ll be alive tomorrow, he might as well be alive right now.”

“I guess.” And put like that, it does make things just a little bit better. 

She checks the clock in the corner of the room. If she’s right, it’ll be three minutes until the alarm sounds. 

She stands. “I have to go. But Teresa... thank you.” 

——  
She almost makes it on the eleventh day. 

She tries to bring the Cure to Newt, because trying it the other way around only seems like a recipe for disaster. She gets caught for real. She’d been careless, close to escaping the tower, thought she’d done it enough times to make it out unscathed. 

Newt dies, and it’s her fault. 

She’s not quite sure how she makes it back to the ship. Brenda guides her, she thinks, gets her onto the Berg. Whatever happens, it doesn’t quite break through the numbness that’s set in. Nothing really does, until she steps onto the deck of the ship and watches Harriet’s face run the gauntlet of relief-anger-concern.  
She pulls Harriet aside, as aside as you can be on a ship carrying hundreds of other people, and she breaks.

Sonya didn’t cry. It wasn’t a display of strength, maybe only a little bit of a pride thing. She just didn’t do it. It had made Harriet and some of the others distrust her at first, as she’d learned later, when she’d come up in the Box and gone the whole first week without tears. 

So now, as her vision goes watery, as she furiously swipes at her cheeks, a distant part of her registers the shock on Harriet’s face. 

“Sonya, what happened?”

The truth spills out, spills like bile. “I had a brother. I had a brother, and he’s dead because I couldn’t save him.”

Harriet doesn’t know what to say. Sonya doesn’t think she would either.

“Guess it turns out I cry after all,” she chokes out. “And you wanna know what’s stupid? I didn’t even know him.”

And Harriet, bless her, Harriet knows her, because instead of pretending, she just says, “Maybe it is stupid,” and pulls her in close anyway. 

Sonya sobs on her shoulder for far too long. Every time she thinks she’s done, every time she straightens up and wipes away the tears, she sees Newt’s blank stare. And sometimes it turns into the girls they lost to the Maze, and sometimes it’s the parents who she can’t remember but whose faces she parses out in the similarities between Newt’s face and her own. 

She cries until she can’t, and then she wipes away the tears. 

She stays up late, and she plans. She diagrams out exactly where she needs to be, because she knows in her heart she only has one more shot before she breaks. She memorizes it, backwards and forwards and everything in between, because when she wakes it will be gone again.  
______________  
She has to believe day twelve is the end.

She takes off in the early morning, with just a whisper to Harriet that she’ll be back. She makes her way into the city one last time, stakes out her position, and waits. It’s all constants and variables, the same events with the time slightly off, and she can’t afford to mess it up again. 

She waits.

She waits.

She waits.

And then she sees them, headed down the hallway she’d followed them down the first time, before she’d learned the paths in her sleep. And maybe she still doesn’t know Newt, but seeing him alive and moving still nearly knocks her off her feet.

Teresa was right. He’s not dead in any timeline that matters, because he’s alive in this one and he’s going to stay that way. 

Newt falls behind, and she knows this is her chance. He splits off, and even with the mask, Sonya can tell he’s struggling to catch his breath. He turns into the bathroom, letting Thomas move on without him for a minute, and Sonya mentally applauds his decision. It’ll be the one place without cameras. 

Of course, it’s also the men’s restroom, but she’s dealt with worse. 

It’s mercifully empty when she follows him in. He’s on his knees in one of the stalls, choking up the black bile or blood or whatever it is that she saw before the last time he died. _He’s still alive,_ she reminds herself. _He’s alive this time._

She steps forward and he turns, scrambling to his feet surprisingly quickly, launcher at the ready. 

She raises her hands. “Wait, waitwaitwait.” Moving slowly, she takes off the helmet, and desperately hopes he won’t shoot while the mask is blocking her eyes. 

He doesn’t lower the launcher, but he does move his finger away from the trigger a little bit. “You’re from Group B,” he says. “I don’t remember your name right now, sorry. Things are-” he makes a vague gesture with his free hand “-not quite functioning right.”

“Sonya.”

“Sonya. Are you with them?”

“What? No. I’m here to help. Or, okay, mostly I’m here to save you.”

“As in a collective ‘you,’ or me specifically?”

“Um. You specifically. It’s a long story, I’ll tell you later, but we need-”

He makes a hacking noise turning back around to cough up more black fluid, and Sonya frowns. She could swear it hadn’t been this bad this early.

He catches his breath, but then something changes in his body language. It’s subtle, but it’s unnatural, and it’s enough for Sonya to dive out of the way before the launcher blast can hit her. 

She lunges for the door, but instead of running, she locks it. The last thing they need is for someone to walk in right now. It’ll probably be the death of both of them. 

Cautiously, she peeks out from behind the wall. 

He’s fighting for control. It’s happening fast, switching between madness to clarity and back to madness too quickly to track, and all she can do is let him fight it. She could stun him, but she’s not sure what it’ll do to him in an already-fragile state. 

Then there’s a moment when his eyes clear, and she takes her chances. She ducks around him, says, “I’m sorry,” and before he can respond, she knocks her brother out. She catches him before his head hits the floor, although he’s probably going to have some nasty bruises on most of his body in addition to the blow that had knocked him unconscious. She tries not to feel guilty. That, he can survive. 

Of course, getting him up to the lab will be a much different ordeal. 

She’s got the bathroom door open, his arm over her shoulder, trying to work out the best way to move him, and then she very nearly runs into Thomas. Or Thomas very nearly runs into her. He’s been backtracking, rapidly if the way he’s breathing is anything to go off of. 

“What did you do to him?”

“I’m saving his life. Help me get him up to the lab.”

“No- what? No!”

“Thomas. He’s dead in eleven other timelines. Do you want to make it twelve?”

Thomas looks like he’s taken a physical blow at that. “What do you mean, eleven other-”

“Do you want him to die?”

She can tell he’s fighting down the question, but he swallows hard and says, “No.”

“Then I need you to trust me.”

He looks between her and Newt’s unconscious form for a moment, clearly weighing his options. She knows what he’s going to say before he says it, though, not because she’s seen this before but because she’s staked everything on Thomas’ need to save Newt being stronger than his distrust. 

“Okay. But you’re gonna help me save Minho in his place.”

“Done. We’ve got about half an hour before they pull him into the lab, but that should give us plenty of time to get to Teresa and have her cure Newt.” ]

“Teresa?” Thomas stops dead. “I’m not handing him over to her.”

“We need her. The cure you have- it’s not permanent. The one she has is.”

“We’ll figure something out.”

“Again, eleven timelines where he’s dead. Do you want to take your chances with a cure that never gets here in time, and won’t even save his life?”

“You are absolutely going to have to explain this later,” Thomas says, but he hoists Newt’s arm into a better position over his shoulder, and starts moving again. “Left?”

“Yeah. Then into the elevator, 79th floor, and a right turn.”

Three scientists turn into their hallway, and they both go silent, standing a little straighter as they march along with Newt between them. Two of them don’t pay attention, but one watches them, and is opening her mouth to say something when Sonya says, “Caught one of the test subjects impersonating a guard. We’re returning him.” She’s not sure whether the scientist accepts that, but it’s enough to let them continue without incident. 

The hallways are more crowded now, so they have to stay silent as they make their way up to the lab. It’s easier than it should be, probably, but no one looks at faceless guards. She’s learned a lot in the last few days about being the kind of person people ignore. 

She swears she can almost feel Thomas struggling not to speak, probably struggling not to ask her why she knows her way through the building so well. She’d find it suspicious, too. Still, thankfully, he stays quiet. 

By the time they make it to the lab, she’s struggling to stay upright. Newt’s far from heavy- it’s not like any of them actually managed to eat well- but dragging anyone along for this long would be exhausting. She more or less hands him off to Thomas, pointing toward the treatment table, and heads into the next room, where she knows she’ll find Teresa. Tiny timeshifts aside, she’s always there.

It’s a waste of time to talk now, with the clock ticking. She’s not sure how long it’ll take for Newt to wake up, and more than that, she’s not sure what kind of state he’ll be in when he does. She just beckons Teresa in, and Teresa frowns, but she follows. 

As soon as they’re both inside, Sonya turns. “Seal off the lab.”

“What?”

“Do it and I’ll explain.”

Teresa turns to hover over a red button. “Tell me why I shouldn’t put the whole building on alert.”  
“Because I have a test subject for you. And you haven’t the other times.” Sonya’s gambling their lives on either of those things piquing Teresa’s interest, holding her breath as she waits. 

After what seems like an eternity, Teresa’s hand moves from the red button to a keyboard, hitting the sequence to block off the lab. 

“Who are you?”

Sonya looks at the cameras in every corner, and decides against taking her helmet off. No one checks the antechamber cameras, she knows that from experience, but there’s no way they’ll be that lucky in the heart of the building. “I’m from Group B. And he’s with me, kid from C. He doesn’t talk.” And god, this whole thing has made her a fluent liar.

“Your voice sounds familiar. Do I know you?”

“It’s complicated. I mean, we’ve met, but...”

“But?”

“Treat him first. Then we can talk.”

She knows Teresa now. She hadn’t before, but she knows that the one thing she won’t be able to resist is a chance to test the Cure. To make it all mean something. 

And as if on cue, Teresa turns, grabbing a test tube and a syringe. “You know I can’t guarantee that this will work. I know what I’ve seen under a microscope, and it seems like it worked on someone else, but-”

“It’ll work. It has to.”

Still, she holds her breath as Teresa fills the syringe and preps the injection site. It needs to work. It needs to work, because she doesn’t know what she’ll do if it doesn’t. 

Teresa empties the Cure into Newt’s arm, and the world seems to stand still. 

He twitches once, twice, then convulses, knocking the tray off the table. Thomas dives for one arm and Sonya goes for the other, trying to get one of the straps around his wrist. Sonya just narrowly avoids getting kneed in the face, but they get him restrained. 

The thrashing doesn’t stop, though. 

Through gritted teeth, Thomas mutters, “Newt, come on, come on,” and Sonya’s heart goes cold, then sinks.

“Thomas?” Teresa freezes in place. 

The room is still, and it takes them all a second to realize what that stillness means. Into the silence, Newt breathes. 

_____________  
**Epilogue**

She’d left Newt alone on the ship, mostly. Well, it had been less of her own decision, and more a function of the fact that he’d been asleep every time she checked, with the exception of the one time she was awake but his friends were there. 

She’d visited Teresa that time instead, in the storage room that was functioning as a holding cell. They’d talked for a long time, about the time loops and what they’d meant, first, because Teresa had gotten stuck on that as soon as it was brought up, but she’d also asked why Sonya had saved her. Sonya hadn’t known quite what to say to that.

“I’d save everyone, if I could,” she’d said, but while that was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. So she’d added, “We talked a lot in the other loops. You helped me. I wouldn’t have gotten out without you. I owed you.”

“The others hate me. I understand why. Don’t you?”

“Yeah, well. In my experience, they're not great at thinking in shades of grey.”

Teresa had laughed a little at that. “That sounds like Thomas.”

She’s not sure where they’re keeping Teresa now that they’re in the Safe Haven, although she intends to find out. Right now, though, Newt is sitting alone on the rocks, staring out at the water. 

She joins him, perching a couple stones up. “You look less rough than the last time I saw you,” she says, because her brain-to-mouth filter has never been the best. 

Newt laughs. “I don’t know what you mean. I felt bloody spectacular.” Then his expression shifts, becoming more serious. “Thomas said that you said something, after knocking me out- which, by the way, _hurt-_ ”

“Saved your life, didn’t it?”

“-but it saved my life. And I suppose I haven’t actually thanked you for that yet, so thank you. But Thomas said... he said you called me your brother.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s true?”

“Yeah. Found out from the profiles WCKD had on us. Well, Teresa found it, which is a topic for another time, but it’s true.”

He studies her for a moment, and Sonya knows because she’s done the same thing that he’s looking for the traits that tie them together. She’s half-tempted to ask what he finds, to compare their lists and ask if he feels the same way about sharing features with a person who’s more or less a stranger. 

“So if you saw your file, or our files,” he says, finally, “did you find out your real name? Is there something else I should call you?”

She measures that question out for a second. It’s not that she has a different answer to give him. She hadn’t looked. It’s just that “real name” feels oddly loaded. She’d survived the Maze as Sonya, made it across the Scorch as Sonya, run and fought and escaped WCKD as Sonya. Maybe they’d given her that name, but she’d fought them for control of every letter and won. “I think as far as I’m concerned, this is my real name.”

Newt nods, and she thinks he understands what she means. 

“Second, stupider question: Why do you have a different accent?”

Sonya shrugs. “You’re two years older than me. I guess I was young enough when they took us that mine adapted.”

“Maybe.” They’re both quiet for a moment, and then he asks, “Do you know what happened to our parents?”

“How much do you want to know?”

The non-answer is apparently enough to go off of, because he nods. “They’re dead, then.” He’s clearly not sure how to feel, and she can’t help but feel the same way. It’s a distant sadness, at most, for people they never knew, and it feels like it should be so much more immediate.  
“WCKD took us and shot them,” she says, because he feels like she should at least know the whole answer. 

He’s quiet again, just looking down at his hands, rubbing his thumb across his right wrist. After a minute, he says, “It feels like this should all mean more, doesn’t it? Not that I don’t like having a sister, but-”

“No, I get it. It’s probably different being reunited with a sibling you actually remember, or-”

“Or mourning parents you have any recollection of,” he finishes.

That statement hangs in the air for a minute, before she says, “I guess we’ll have to figure this out as we go, then.”

“Yeah. And last question, because I have to ask.”

“What?” She thinks she knows, because none of the subjects in the Maze were stupid, and there are plenty of things that don’t add up.

“How did you find me?”

“It’s gonna sound insane,” she says, giving him a chance to accept things as they are.

“I don’t know about you, but from the moment I woke up in the Box, there hasn’t been one thing about my life that’s not insane.”

She laughs at that. “I mean, you’re right. But still.”

“Just tell me.”

“The day I saved your life was the twelfth time I’d lived that day. I’d go to sleep and wake up in the morning of the same day, again and again until I finally got it right.”

“So getting it right-”

“Meant saving you. Nothing else worked, but the day I kept you alive was the day I made it out.”

At first it doesn’t look like he’s going to believe her, and it’s not that she would blame him, she’s just tired of having to talk people into believing her. Finally, though, he just says, “Alright.”

“That’s it?”

“It’d be an awfully odd thing to lie about.”

“That’s what I said!”

Newt chuckles a little at how emphatic it comes out, then says, “Besides, I think it’s in my best interest to believe you. Not just because you saved my life, also because you seem kind of dangerous.”

She rolls her eyes. “Listen, like I said, I only knocked you out to save your life.”

“And you broke into the city how many times?”

“I mean... a lot. But it gets easier.”

“Can’t imagine it’s ever actually easy.”

Sonya tips her head a little, something between agreement and dissent but not yet sure of which one, but then gets distracted by a stone tumbling down from above them.

She turns to find Harriet picking her way down the outcropping toward them, hand raised against the setting sun. “Sonya?”

“Yeah?” She stands, turning back to Newt. “I suspect I’m needed. But I’ll... see you around?”

“I don’t suspect you have a choice, unless you find somewhere else to go.” She flips him off, and he laughs, and it’s the most familiar thing they’ve done yet. “I’ll see you around, though,” he says, and Sonya gives him a little joking salute before heading off to join Harriet. 

“Good talk?” Harriet says. “It seemed like you were getting along. Well, you were making rude gestures at him, so I have to assume you were getting along.”

“I think so.”

“He did always seem like a more levelheaded sort than some of the others. You could have done worse.”

“Probably. And I think it’s all getting a little less weird, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

Sonya shrugs. “Just... I have a brother,” she says, and for the first time that might actually mean something.


End file.
